Current water quality testing systems can be hard to use in the field, and lab-based tests are expensive and cause delays. Resulting data is generally difficult to share making it hard to act on it quickly and to engage communities who don’t know about problems in their local water supply.
Smartphones transform water quality measurement, making results accessible in real time. Testing can scale up on a very affordable basis, with data immediately accessible and shareable via an online dashboard. It can lead to faster, better interventions and action.
Because it’s cheap and easy to use, citizens may eventually be able to test their own water supply, thereby democratising data collection.
Akvo's Caddisfly is a simple, low cost, open source, smartphone-based drinking water testing system connected to an online data platform. Existing features of the phone combine with software apps and pocket-sized hardware attachments, to conduct reliable tests on water samples and then share this data with the people who need to see it.
Akvo Caddisfly has already been beta tested at scale in Africa, Asia and Europe. It will be widely available in early 2017.
